A Great New Pitching Chart

Charting anything should give you information that’s fast and accurate – otherwise it’s a waste of time! If you end up with a bunch of information that you never have time to use then what good is it? Discover an amazing pitching chart that is not only simple, but also extremely powerful for your pitchers.

During this past Women’s College World Series I met with a dear friend of mine – Missy Lombardi, Assistant Coach from University of Oklahoma – who is one of the best pitching minds in the business. Missy is always finding better ways to do things and we enjoy bouncing ideas off each other. During this discussion Missy showed me a very simple, and yet amazingly effective way of charting pitches she’d come up with that we both felt was fantastic.

While it doesn’t really have a name, I call it Above the Line Charting as that’s basically the whole goal, to keep things “above the line” – you’ll see what I mean in a second. Tracking results & information – or charting – has become a psychotic obsession in our game now and it’s not going away anytime soon, nor should it. But I find that too many people spend too much time charting and never really do much with the finished product. Time is an issue for all of us and one of the things I find so incredible about this Above the Line Charting is that it’s so simple and all the information you need is immediately apparent without having to translate it, print it out, or otherwise further process the charted info.

Let’s take a quick look at a few innings that Monica Abbot recently pitched when the USA National Softball beat Australia in the Finals of the KFC World Cup of Softball.

At first glance this Above the Line Charting might look confusing but keep these simple principles in mind:

1. Start by drawing a line from left to right across your sheet. This line acts as Ground Zero for all pitches – you’ll see why soon.
2. Every pitch is shown by a dot.
3. Every Strike the dot goes UP from the previous dot.
4. Every Ball the dot goes DOWN from the previous dot.
5. After every batter put a thin line up and down.
6. After every inning put a thick line up and down.

It’s really that simple. That’s one thing I really love about this – it’s really simple and yet very powerful. So just based on these 6 principles we can tell the following from looking at this Above the Line chart:

• Monica threw to 10 batters (note that these batters were not consecutive in this particular game, I’ve pulled out a few to use as an example)
• She spent most of her time – or pitches – Above the Line – throwing 27 Strikes & 13 balls. That’s pretty good!

For many of our pitchers this might be enough information to help them see just how often they are “getting ahead” since it’s actually showing pitches in the form of a picture.

But for many of us, this just isn’t enough information so of course we’ve got to make even the simple more complex! And, without doing that to the degree that this type of “simple chart” loses its effectiveness, here’s what I’ve done to provide just a little more necessary detail without getting so much information it’s all a big fat useless mess.

I’ve broken this now-more-cluttered chart into 3 different parts, so let’s talk about each one:

1. In this part I’ve simply put letters over each dot and these letters represent what that particular pitch was: C for Curve, R for Rise, D for Drop, etc… I’ve also listed the result for that batter in bolder letters after the last pitch, so K is for Strikeout, 4-3 is a groundout to 2^nd base who threw to 1^st, 1B is a single and HR – well, we’ll get to that in a minute. So by adding the type of pitch above or below the dot you can see which pitch and in which order was a ball or strike and what the result for the batter was. You can mark foul balls by putting a little dot next to the type of pitch. Monica threw to 3 batters in (1) striking out 2 of them and getting the 3^rd batter to ground out to 2^nd on a Riseball (odd, isn’t it?)
2. In the second part I start off showing each type of pitch for the 1^st batter and then for the remaining 2 hitters I just show whether that pitch was a ball or strike (remember, by the dot either going up (strike) or down (ball) and what happened to the hitter. I just want you to see how the type of pitch often clutters up the look. You’ll notice in this second portion that Monica starts hanging out Below the Line more than she did in the first part – which might be something you’d want to look at later on.
3. In the 3^rd part you can see that she starts off behind 2-0 on the first hitter and ends up striking her out, but must literally climb the hill in order to do it. This is a great visual example for pitchers to see how tough it becomes when you fall behind early. In fact, look at all the batters that Monica faces in this example (10 of them) and just pay attention to how often she throws a strike in one of the 1^st 2 pitches: 9 out of 10. That’s one reason she’s so successful! Now – look at the very last hitter in this example. It’s Stacey Porter who is Australia’s best hitter. Monica gets ahead, and then throws a ball, then a strike followed by 2 balls in a row. And it’s the 2 balls in a row that force Monica to have to get back to the line and she throws a strike that’s too fat and – Home Run! She really battled her control on this hitter and the hitter won. It happens sometimes but you can see through the dots how she never spent much time Above the Line with this hitter! That’s the power of this type of charting!

Whether you ever end up using this type of simplified pitching chart or not, I don’t know, but I do hope that I’ve stretched your mind a bit to the possibility of finding a different way of doing the same thing. Missy is the one that helped me find this method and like I said, I’ve shared it with a number of coaches since then and the overwhelming feedback is they love it for its simplicity and for how powerful it is for their pitchers

For more information on charting check out the following:

• eClinic: Pitching Charts – How to Use Them to Win More Games
• eClinic: Critical Counts: How to Stop the Walks
• Book: Softball Strategies, Coverages, Signals & Charts